Suzanna Davison: Visualisation

“The ruinous landscape can demonstrate something of the other, a different moment in time, lacunae, here and there strewn with ruins, can in a fragmentary way stir up something of the past, as a support to the memory of a city.” – Jan De Graaf

Wastelands are often looked at as inane eyesores, as having “no reason to exist.”-Breton. I have always been intrigued and enchanted by the museum like qualities they hold, every barren landscape has a history to tell. Sontag writes “places disfigured and made barren supply a pocket relation to our past.” In wastelands across Britain, this work tells a story of these spaces before they were left to ruin, through the use of archival photographs. Based on the theory of ‘Genius Loci’, a sense of spirit of place created through knowledge of history, the photographs juxtapose the past and the present, attempting to incite the beauty of each place in the viewer.